Multi-soloing

Clan Lord is a multi-player game.  It was designed for multiple people to fill multiple roles: fighter, healer and advisor.  Sometimes a role doesn't need filling, such as a when ranger hunts alone for coins in a low-risk area.  The ranger doesn't really need the assistance of a healer, especially if the ranger has a high-troilus morph.  Clan Lord enables this form of single-player gaming, but it wasn't designed for it.

A trend that is rising in popularity is multi-solo play, where a solo player uses multiple accounts to fill the roles of a hunt.  The fighter on one account hunts a risky area while the healer on another account idles in a safe area.  Clan Lord enables this form of play, but it wasn't designed for it.

This style of playing Clan Lord troubles me, and I have struggled articulating why.  I think the heart of the problem is that multi-soloing reduces the fun for other players.  I compare this to being invited over to a friend's home to play a multi-player X-box game with the expectation of being a participant, but instead being reduced to the role of spectator as the friend uses both joysticks to play the game.  It may be fun and challenging and rewarding for the friend, but it's not a lot of fun for me.

From a design viewpoint, the challenge is to encourage social play while de-emphasizing solo play.  This is more of a social issue; how do we get players want to play together?  We can't force people to play together, so surrounding the multi-soloist with technical limitations and restrictions won't change anything.  Writing a cybercop script to patrol the lands for botting healers is not, in my opinion, the correct approach.  This is a design problem and it needs a design solution.  However, when I see a slave fighter, a slave healer and a slave tagger multi-soloing, I still shake my head in despondent disbelief.

This is what I think about at night while waiting for sleep.